WCCC 1995

Deep Blue Prototype missed the expected win at the WCCC 1995 by losing the decisive match in round 5 against Fritz after king castling into Fritz's half open g-file. Description given in 1995 from the ICGA site [2] :

Deep Blue Prototype consists of an IBM RS/6000 workstation with 14 chess search engines as slave processors. Each processor contains a VLSI chip for move generation, as well as additional hardware for search and evaluation. Each Deep Thought 2 processor searches about 500,000 positions per second standalone, or about 400,000 positions per second as a slave processor. (This is about 1/10th of the projected speed of the Deep Blue single-processor currently in fabrication.) The 14- processor Deep Thought 2 typically searches between 3 and 5 million positions per second. When conducting a search, the search tree near the root position is processed on the host workstation, and includes selective search extension algorithms such as singular extensions. The deepest nodes in the search tree are handled by the slave search engines which usually do 4-ply alpha-beta searches.

Kasparov versus Deep Blue

Deep Blue was the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion Garry Kasparov under regular time controls. This first win occurred on February 10, 1996, Game 1. However, Kasparov won three games and drew two of the following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2.

The Rematch

In 1997 Deep Blue won the rematch against Kasparov. He did not recover after the shock by Deep Blues' play in game 2. Kasparov resigned a drawn position, since he missed a deep tricky perpetual check, while he wrongly was confident the machine would not have blundered to allow him to draw. In the final decisive game 6 Kasparov was rather indisposed and blundered in the early opening.

The Deep Blue Team

Feng-hsiung Hsu - The man who started the Deep Blue project while still in college

Murray Campbell - A former chess champion who works with Deep Blue's evaluation function